Are there other members returning to Fluther after a long absence?

I’m fairly new on the platform. From what I’ve seen, only a small percentage of people are active. You find the same bunch of people asking questions and the same bunch of answerers in most of the topics. I don’t know the total count of members in Fluther but I can see that a good number of people join everyday. Most of them probably are here only to read and not ask or answer questions…but even with that in mind, there is a huge gap between active and inactive members.

I’ll be honest. The platform needs more activity. It needs more diversity in question topics and more participation from members. Prior to this, I was on another QnA platform, which has mighty activity. I left that because of late, it has become a ‘marketing and promotional’ platform, with ridiculous new regulations and juvenile arbiters. Before that, I was on Yahoo Answers, which went bust because of the same reasons that currently plagues the bigger platform I left. Fluther has been around for long. I had an old account that I forgot about and had to create this one..but the activity levels of old fluther and the current one is almost the same…that has to change….

I’ve recently returned after an absence of a year. I left because I felt the nature of the site was changing and it was breaking up into cliques. It doesn’t feel like that now, not to me anyway, but it has become quieter.

I’ve been here all along but there have certainly been a number who leave for a long time and then show up again – either because something has happened to someone on the site or because they have had a change in their life.

(I remember you.)

Like Dorothy said in the Wizard of Oz, “people come and go so quickly around here.”

I don’t generally notice when people leave (unless they die, in which case they don’t return), and I only recognize their return when they write something relevant.

This a sort of community. People move out all the time.

Having said that, there are some old timer that I haven’t seen in years, and I wonder what happened to them

@AK A lot of the “new members’ who join and are never heard from are spammers whose spam and membership are deleted by the mods before you even see it. Most never become active members.

You are right that there is only a core active membership now. It was livelier in some prior periods but “that has to change” is not likely.

Think of Fluther as a niche.

I think one of the big reasons Fluther hasn’t grown is that we (Jellies) don’t want to tell anybody about it, because the nature of our posts can be private and intimate – secret thoughts, annoyances, etc. So if we tell our friends “check out this site Fluther” and they came here, it might be easy for them to figure out who we are. At least, for me, that’s why I tell very few people. I wouldn’t want anybody from real life figuring out who I am here.

This site is a pretty special place, with some really great people on it. It’s nice to have you back.

I’ve had several longish absences. I came back for a time to help keep vigil for Gailcalled in 2015, when she was nearing the end, and after a lapse I returned again when the pandemic made ties with a warm online fellowship especially valuable. Most of the time, mutual respect counts for more than ideological and cultural differences.

Unfortunately there are some troublemakers who come here and don’t value that. Instead some of them seem to be on personal missions to turn things sour or just keep up a level of agitation, as if civil discourse were an open invitation to disturbance. Others are just plain rude and sarcastic. I will not engage with them at all.

The mods are wonderful, but they can’t do everything. What seems to work best is simply to carry on as we do, friend to friend. Let the trolls stomp their feet like Rumpelstiltskin until they split in half or simply get themselves banned.

Nikipedia wandered in the other day.

UCME just showed up!

The majority, including me, return to pay respect to someone who passes away. We’ve lost so many over the years. :(

I remember you, SAB. Hi!

Returned? Not so much!
More like, slid in through the tradesmen’s entrance for a quick peeky boo.

No. I just joined and this is my first time here!

Welcome @spiderbuck!